Because the internet has became a staple in the daily lives of the majority of people around the world, it is important for business owners to realize how much their company can benefit from having a properly optimized web site. Regardless of whether a company sells products or services, having a web site that is properly optimized can and will provide several major benefits for any company.
Obviously, the first major benefit of having a web site for your company is an increase in revenue. As long as your web site is properly optimized by a professional firm, your web site will help you increase your sales of your company's products or services. When a web site is properly optimized, it will be able to attract targeted visitors.
This means that the majority of the traffic your web site receives will be people that are already interested in the products or services your company is providing, which will make the task of completing a sale much easier (instead of trying to complete a sale with an un-targeted visitor).
In addition to increasing your company's revenues, a quality web site will increase the awareness of your company's brand. Because people will consistently see your web site when they are searching for something in your industry, they will associate your company's brand and name as a reliable leader in that industry.
Finally, when your company has its own web site, it will actually increase your company's credibility in the off-line world. Because people expect businesses of all sizes to have their own web site, when you are able to print your web site's URL on materials such as business cards or fliers, people will instantly feel that your company is more credible than one of your competitors that has not taken the time to have a web site created for their company.
In order to have a properly optimized web site that your potential customers will actually be able to find when they visit a search engine like Google, you need to work with an internet marketing SEO firm. In case you are not familiar with this terminology, an internet marketing SEO firm combines the practices of internet marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) to provide their customers with the highest level of service.
Internet marketing methods include search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising and viral marketing, while search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results.
Although many firms only focus on internet marketing or search engine optimization, by choosing a firm that is experienced in both fields, you can ensure that your web site is properly optimized from every angle and provides the maximum amount of benefits for your company.
As websites age, they will naturally gain popularity. For the newly born websites, they are at a slight disadvantage. Fortunately, the SEO playing field is very fair amongst all competitors. Here are some things you can do to spice up the traffic and rankings.
Unique Content
Although I cannot promise anyone, it would make sense that this rule applies in the far future also. The quality of content will almost always have a decent if not huge impact on the ranking of your website. The amount of content matters, but even more so is the relevancy of the content on your website.
For low cost ideas, try hiring ghost writers or college students. Some websites only have a message boards loaded with people using it to their advantage. These sites are very lucky to have other people generating content for them for free. Pages with only keywords and no real usable content will often get your website blacklisted. This doesn’t mean you have to be a master at writing to develop the content for your site. Not unless the search engines become so sophisticated later on.
Links
Having internal pages linked within your website is a good idea. Linking to other websites won’t help your ranking nearly as much as having other websites linking to yours. Some people try to build a community of sites, and have them linked to each other. Others submit their sites to online directories such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project. This helps your startup site a little bit but not nearly as well as it used to.
URL
Yes! The website address matters more than people think. I’m not talking about the domain name. The chunks of characters after the domain name often contain characters like “?” and “=” for dynamic pages. These characters are not supported by many major search engines and will create difficulty for spiders and bots to crawl through your website.
These are just a few tips to get most people started in marketing their site to the world. The work required is a never ending project since search engines keep updating with more complex search algorithms. When your site grows and surpasses your traffic and ranking expectations, remember, SEO takes more hard work than genius.
Being indexed by Search Engines is easy… Getting your web page up in the SERP (search engine results page) of Google can sometimes be a little harder. In this article I touch on the three most important things to remember when designing your website for search engines.
Choose you keywords right
Keywords are words, or combinations of words, that people use when searching for a website. In order for people to find your website though, your website must show up in the SERP. If those keywords appear in your website then your site should appear somewhere in the results. When people search using Google, Google uses a ranking system to show the order of the results. One of the things Google takes in to account is keyword relevance, therefore keyword optimization is important. Placing your keywords in the meta-tags is not enough. Placing keywords in a strategic way with in your website's content is vital. It is important for the text to still to make sense for visitors to your website. Repeating your keywords over and over again does not help at all, or using text the same color as the background. The best thing to do is have a seat, research your keywords and take your time writing your content so that it makes sense to anyone reading your website and incorporating as many keywords as possible in to the content.
Valuable incoming links are important
All links help. Some links are just more valuable then others. Links that are more important in Google are pages with higher PR (Page Rank) and pages that are relevant. For an example a website with a PR 5 and is unrelated to your website is actually less valuable that a link from a website with a PR 4 that is related to your website. It is important to build your incoming links slowly. It is most important to create links to your website from valuable websites other than a whole bunch of links from websites that are just filled with links or they are link farms.
Page Layout
In order for the search engines to see the text on your website it has to be able to find it. If you have text that is contained within a table which is then contained in another table, it is possible that the crawler or spider may not find it. To avoid this, it is best to avoid using tables at all. In many cases this is not practical. Try putting the most important text outside the table or at least not placing it in table in tables, use just one table. If the crawler cannot find the content then it can't use it to evaluate where your listing should appear in the SERP. To give your self the best possible chance, avoid this mistake.
Your website's code
Creating clean code isn't really an option, it's a necessity. Some designer's don't really remember to clean up the code on the website, as long as it looks right who cares right? It is important, cluttered code also prevents the search engines from getting to your content. Content is King! Right? If your website has unnecessary code, get rid of it. Make sure your pages validate. To get rid of some extra code use external style sheets and external JavaScript sheets and just link to them. Crawlers find it hard to read JavaScript, most times they just skip over it.
Besides the point listed above, my top five tips for "Being Seen in the Search Engines, Now! " would be to minimize the use of JavaScript, as most crawlers can't read it. Make sure every image has an alt attribute. Don't use images for the navigation bar, use plain text and make sure that it remains the same on all pages to make it consistent. Hyperlink to the pages that are lower within the hierarchy of your website from the content of pages on the top level of the hierarchy. Use keywords in your url.
More column inches have been written about how to please the search engines and persuade them to bestow favour on your website than almost any other internet-related topic. But as far as I know no-one has previously tried to understand their gender: do they behave more like a man, or more like a woman? Understand their gender can surely help us to gain a better insight into how to appeal to them.
MSN is very clear: MSN is a man. Everything about MSN is straightforward: do the right thing and you will be recognized. Follow the advice of the experts and you will surely rank highly on MSN as long as your competitors are less diligent in this respect than you.
Good content, relevant titles, keyword-related metatags, loads of quality inbound links, varied keyword anchor-text, a good smattering of deep links and a #1 ranking will be your reward. I have gained #1 positions on MSN for moderately competitive keywords within a week of trying. What you see is what you get with MSN: he is a man.
Is Yahoo a man or a woman? I find it hard to decide. Perhaps it is a serial transsexual, or maybe just androgynous. Sometimes Yahoo is as straightforward as a man: do the right thing, pay your dues and join the club, no complications. This happens to me on some of my keywords: I have followed the rules and gained my reward.
On others, apparently no more competitive, and where I am just as well-optimized, if not better, I am nowhere. For these words, she is a woman, immune to my blandishments.
On the other hand, Google is surely all woman, with womanly wiles and deeply imbued with womanly mystery. If you want to penetrate deep into Google you need to learn the art of seduction. Is there anything on the planet more frustrating than trying to optimize your website to rank highly for a competitive keyword on Google. Sometimes I think not. She is like a woman that is always just out of reach.
She will not reveal her secrets for even the largest bunch of flowers. I know that I have the best content in my category, more quality links, deeper links, more varied anchor text, more articles and more of everything that is supposed to drive positioning than any of my competitors. By far. Not a single one of my 5000 odd backlinks is directly reciprocated, and I have at least 10 inbound links for every outbound one.
I have never paid for a text link ad, or joined a link farm. A decent proportion of my inbound links are voluntary recognition of the value of my site by 3rd parties. Is this enough? Well, yes and no. I do have the best positions on all the search engines, measured on average on all the keywords that I target. But whereas my positions are undisputedly dominant in MSN, they are only excellent in Google. I am only 2nd or 3rd on my target words. I do very well, but I don’t blow away the competition like I do on the others. Google has recognized my worth, somewhat, but she has not opened herself to me entirely.
Like a woman, she has her favourites: sites which appealed to her long ago, but whose luster has long since dimmed in the eyes of the rational observer, can still be favoured with a top position. She is also fickle. I have been trying to build position for a single keyword for a couple of years now. (It’s a fairly competitive category – around 36 million sites feature this word.) When I started my efforts I was at about 25 (by virtue of this single word being part of all the other keywords-phrases that I compete on).
I have steadily built anchor text links with this single word into directories, into articles, into listings on other sites. Lots of these links are on pages with good PR. Better than 80% of these links are nicely inserted into the middle of well-written text.
The outcome: every few weeks I find I have moved up to a respectable position: say 10th, sometimes even 6th or 7th. Then, the next day, or even an hour later, I fall back to 14th or even 18th. She likes me, she flirts with me occasionally, she tolerates my company and sometimes I even manage to amuse her.
But just when I think I could expect a kiss in return as my lips approach, she turns her cheek away and I am banished to the outer circle of courtiers. But her appeal is such that I am drawn again into attempting to understand her mysteries. But I feel that if I ever make it, and my lips touch hers, and she longs for me as I long for her, I will never be sure what it was that I did to merit such bliss.
I am writing this white paper for those people who do not have any idea about search engine optimization (SEO). Special the business community of Pakistan who do not have information on SEO and its importance in today’s world. Search Engine Optimization is the only technique to increase your business revenue form internet and global world.
Making a website is not enough in this era of technology; million of website are building and uploading daily on the global internet world. Main objective to write this paper is to promote search engine optimization in Pakistan. According to an internet report over 85% of internet users, use search engines to find related websites like yours? Millions of people each day turn to the major search engines to find products, services and information. With over one billion web sites listed with search engines, how will your customers ever find you among the competition? Search Engine Optimization is the solution.
SEO technical definition
SEO is short of Search Engine Optimization. The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken.
Why SEO is important today
Today, internet marketing turning point on how popular your site is. Optimizing your site for Search Engine Marketing can result in a large hit rate to your site. This happens only if your site is to show whenever somebody searches for the keywords of your site. If your site is in the top of Search Engine Rankings, you need to take recourse only to search engine promotion. This is the only way you can possibly reach all those people who are really searching for your service or product. Internet Marketing today is dependent only on search engine optimization. It matters little that your website has the most beautiful graphics or the most attractive words.
Internet marketing is now gradually increasing in Pakistan, as we are very late in this field so Pakistani websites are behind in many keywords and in generic keywords. It doesn’t means that we can not reach SEO on generic keywords but it takes a lot of continuous effort to compete the generic keywords. Most important thing in SEO is that how often a website is updated and how much popular website is.
The only way to measure the success of a Natural Search Engine Optimization Campaign is to know where you rank on the Internet's most important search engines for the keyphrases/ keywords which are relevant to your company, business.
Out of million’s of website on a single keyword (example: trading) only 10 websites comes on the first page of search engine result. 20 percent peoples open second page of the search engine result and 5 percent of the peoples go to the 3rd page, it means that only those websites/pages which are in top 30 results of the search engine will derive traffic to their websites from internet.
Basic Techniques of SEO
Optimizing a website for Search Engines is neither as difficult nor or complicated job as we think. We just need to know what practices to be done and how to do it. You can optimize your own pages yourself and receive excellent ranking in a matter of few months.
As, number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content and structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.
Below is a list of items which are important in SEO. Each item are factors that search engines look for when crawling your website in my next coming articles I will discuss each item separately to improve your website in terms of each of the following factor:
Your Keywords
• Selecting your keywords
• Prioritize your keywords
Domain name / Filename
• Domain Registration
• Keyword in domain name
• Keyword in filename
• Length of Website Address
Keyword Placement
• Keyword in title tag
• Keyword in Description Meta-tag
• Keyword in Keyword Meta-tag
• Keyword in Content
• H1, H2 and H3 (Heading)
• Keyword Font Styles
Internal Links
• Keyword in links to internal site pages
• Valid internal links
• Efficient linking
External / Outgoing Links
• Quality Links
• Inspecting your Links
• Title and Description
• Limit number of links on a page
Incoming Links (backlinks)
• Quality of Referrer
• Trend of link popularity
• Anchor Text
• Age of Link
• Number of Outgoing Links on Referrer Page
• Position of Link
• Trusted Websites
• JavaScript/Flash Links
On-Page Factors
• Home Page
• Over optimization penalty (OOP)
• Getting Reported
• File Size
• Freshness of Pages
• Frequency of Updates
• Site Age
• Dynamic Pages
• Texts inside Images
• Excess JavaScript
• Inline Frames and Frames
• Hidden links / texts
• Cloaking
• Duplicate content
• Understandable Content
Off-Page Factors
• Traffic Buying / Link Schemes
• A minimum of one backlink
• Buying Links
• Server IP Address
• Links from bad websites
• Server Reliability and Uptime
User Activity
• Search Engine Traffic
• Click through Rate (CTR)
• Time spent on page
• Monitoring Bookmarks
• Leaving the Website
Gathering Links
• Collecting Links
• Unique Content
• Articles
• Press Release
• Forums / Guest books / Blogs
• Sponsoring
• Directories
• Link Exchange
On top of the factors above, I have used a term crawling there. I would like to give a brief introduction to crawling
Crawling, or web crawling is the method search engines use to create an index of the web. Pages are downloaded by an automated service, called a robot or a spider, and processed by the search engine to allow fast centralized searching. When a search engine downloads a page it generally looks at the hyperlinks on that page and processes them based on a set of policies.
Conclusion
In this article I have given an overview of SEO to you, we can achieve top ranking on search engines with continuous efforts and improving our website contents, layout and related material. I have listed all the techniques you can adopt these techniques to optimize your website and getting top ranked. I will describe each topic in detail in my coming articles.
Author:
Tayyab Ilyas
SEO Expert
Telecube – Islamabad
tayyab@telecube.biz
www.telecube.biz
A sitemap is an aid used in making navigation through a website easier. It contains the structure of the website along with the included links to the major parts and subsections of the website.
A website’s sitemap has a practical and essential use. It makes it easier for visitors to visit through and navigate the website. The navigational help ensures that they do not get lost and that they will not have to look futilely for the information or page that they need.
A visitor who immediately finds the information that he needs quickly in a website has a higher chance of coming back for another visit.
Many website administrators, designers and webmasters do not fully exploit the uses and benefits of having a good sitemap. For most of them, merely providing a list of links that do not really give a good service to visitors to the website is more than adequate. For them, as long as spiders can find the pages in their website then they are content.
But wouldn’t it better if you can design a sitemap page that is not only big help to your visitors but also adds value to your website?
The characteristic of a good sitemap is that each link has an accompanying description about the target page for each link. This helps visitors who go to your site and would rely on it in navigating through your webpages.
Let’s look at two examples:
Example 1
Link with no description
Rock music
Example 2
Link with description
Rock music, the history of British rock music, From the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Duran Duran, U2, The best British bands and rock acts in history. Trace how rock music in Britain evolved.
There is a definite difference between these two examples. From a mere cursory look at the two examples it is obviously apparent that the second example is far more effective in giving the proper information to visitors.
Website visitors are more likely to appreciate the kind of listing illustrated in Example No. 2. This is because most people are more at home with a search engine style listing because it is easier to navigate. No one would like to visit a website and see a sitemap presented similarly to the first example because there is a complete lack of information.
There is also an added benefit to making a descriptive sitemap. It helps in raising your search engine ranking.
By building your sitemap in such a way that you put all the links to related pages on each sitemap page, you are making, in effect, a themed sitemap page.
Let us say that you have 7 pages that all relate to British rock music, by putting it all together you make a British rock music themepage. This kind of page will have the element a search engine considers is essential for a high ranking web page: keyword rich text.
It pays to make a good sitemap. Making a conscious effort to make one will bring great benefits to your website.
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